On 20 May 2006, at three in the morning, an Ecuadorian reaches the summit of Everest. He climbs in alpine style, with no intermediate camp, without oxygen up to 8,650 metres, opening an emergency bottle in the final metres because he simply can’t go on. He comes back down in thirty-six hours, without eating or drinking. It is the seventh and final mountain of his project: he becomes the first Latin American to have climbed the highest peak on each of the seven continents solo.
His name is José Ignacio Jijón, but everyone calls him Pepe. Twenty years later, he no longer climbs. He produces one of the most sought-after coffees in Latin America, in a country that imports more coffee than it produces.
A motorbike, a wrist, a forest
What ends the mountaineering is a motorbike accident that leaves his right wrist paralysed. He looks for a place to settle and buys land in the Intag Valley, north-west of Quito, in the province of Imbabura. The original idea has nothing to do with coffee: plant trees and disappear for a while. He calls the place Soledad, solitude.
At that point, he doesn’t drink coffee. It’s the local farmers who tell him his land is made for it. He has no agricultural training and it takes him more than ten years to produce something clean. He summed it up better than we ever could: he thought Everest would be the hardest thing he’d ever do, and then he started a coffee farm.
The Intag Valley
Intag is a cloud-forest valley, humid, incredibly rich in biodiversity, and known for something other than coffee: thirty years of standoff between local communities and the mining industry. In March 2023, the provincial court of Imbabura blocked the Llurimagua copper project on the basis of the rights of nature enshrined in the Ecuadorian Constitution. That is the context in which Pepe is replanting.
Of the property’s 120 hectares, coffee covers only four to eight hectares depending on the year. The rest is forest, much of it restored after decades of mining and intensive farming. The farm is run biodynamically, without any certification on display, and employs, among others, single mothers from the valley.
Typica Mejorado and Sidra, two varieties found nowhere else
The two varieties that built Ecuador’s reputation in specialty coffee come from a Nestlé research station in the neighbouring province of Pichincha, where Ethiopian seeds had been imported to create productive hybrids. A field technician, Olger Rogel, spotted two plants with a remarkable sensory profile and named them Sidra and Typica Mejorado.
The name is misleading. Typica Mejorado is not an improved Typica: genetic analyses show a cross between Bourbon and an Ethiopian variety. It was simply named that way because of how similar it tastes in the cup. The trees are tall, yields are low, and the plant grows almost only in Ecuador, with a little in Colombia and Costa Rica.
Pepe received his first Typica Mejorado seeds in 2010. The mother plants from that first lot are still on the finca. He also grows Sidra, Caturra, Castillo and Geisha.
The Wave process, or how not to rush a coffee bean
It’s his signature, and this is where you need to be precise, because the term gets used a lot without ever being explained.
Wave is not an extreme fermentation. It’s the opposite. Pepe’s idea is that the coffee bean is a living embryo that needs to be guided into dormancy without ever being put through a shock. In practice, he makes the temperature fluctuate during fermentation, alternating warm and cold phases in refrigerated tanks. Hence the name: a wave, not a peak. This alternation avoids the thermal stress and sudden drop in pH that damage the bean’s structure.
The rest of the protocol varies from lot to lot, but the framework stays the same. Cherries picked at around 22 Brix, sorted and washed by hand. Whole-cherry fermentation for about three days in a temperature-controlled tank. Pulping, then a second fermentation on the mucilage for 24 to 72 hours in a closed environment, often with a mosto from a previous lot. Washing, then slow drying in a dark room for nearly a month, with regular turning and controlled airflow, until moisture comes down to around 11%.
When it’s done well, the result is the cleanness of a washed coffee with the aromatic density of a natural. No fermentation notes flattening everything else, which has become rare in competition coffees.
What the coffee world made of it
The turning point came at World of Coffee in Milan in 2021. Two years later, Hong Kong barista Dawn Chan finished fourth at the World Barista Championship with a Typica Mejorado from Finca Soledad. At the end of 2023, he received the Sprudgie Award for Producer of the Year, from the sector’s most widely read publication.
Today his lots go to roasters you don’t stumble upon by chance: Sey in New York, Onyx in Arkansas, Coffea Circulor in Sweden, September in Canada. He was also one of the first Ecuadorian producers to work on pricing models where the full value goes back to the farm.
Putushio, the second chapter
More recently, Pepe has also been working in the south of the country, in Loja, with Francisco Vintimilla, the first person to plant coffee in the area. Their joint project is called Fincas del Putushio and brings together two properties, Surya and San Pedro, at 2,200 metres, in a dry, broken landscape where cacti grow. That’s where he makes his classic washed coffees, slowly dried. Back home in Intag, you’re six or seven hundred metres lower and in a radically different climate.
Why all this is so unlikely
It helps to get the scale right. Ecuador produces around 500,000 60 kg bags a year, a figure that has been falling steadily for fifteen years, and imports more than it produces to supply its instant coffee industry. Dollarisation in the early 2000s made labour expensive, around 20 dollars a day per picker. The average coffee producer there is around sixty, and young people are leaving.
In that landscape, a man with no farming background who buys forest to get away from it all, plants four hectares and ends up selling his coffee to roasters on four continents is not following a normal path. It’s pretty much the opposite of what the coffee economy usually rewards.
Our two lots
We took thirty kilos of each, both Wave Fermented Honey, scored at 88 points. That’s not much, and that’s normal: at this farm size, there simply isn’t any volume.
| Key facts | Finca Soledad |
|---|---|
| Region | Intag Valley, Imbabura province |
| Producer | José Ignacio “Pepe” Jijón |
| Area | 120 ha, of which 4 to 8 ha under coffee |
| Varieties | Typica Mejorado, Sidra, Caturra, Castillo, Geisha |
| Harvest | May to September |
| Second farm | Fincas del Putushio, Loja, 2,200 m |
The Typica Wave Fermented Honey is the more straightforward of the two. Light honey, prune, a clean lemon note that holds it all together. Silky mouthfeel, long finish. Brew it as filter or in a cafetière, without trying to push it.
The Sidra Wave Fermented Honey is broader, almost creamy. Blackberry, candied date, a bergamot note that lifts the whole cup. It copes well with espresso and bean-to-cup machines, which is quite rare at this level of complexity.
If you’re only going to try one, pick the one that suits your brewing method. They’re equally good, they just tell different stories.
